“Sometimes I think everyone is just pretending to be brave, and none of us really are. Maybe pretending is how you get brave.”  

-George R. R. Martin, A Storm of Swords   (via kallissi)

Nope.  I wish it were like that.  The truth about bravery is that it requires someone hurting you so much and leaning on you so hard to try and eliminate you from humanity, that you finally wake up one day not giving a shit, with your kindness and goodness and gentleness choked to death and gone.  Then you turn around and start saying everything you were afraid to say, and threatening to do things you never thought you could do, and not caring about the legal or social ramifications, and suddenly you barrel straight toward them just for the fun and pleasure of ripping their head off because you actually no longer care whether or not you live or die, as long as you can launch yourself toward their face for the fun of biting off whatever you can get to.

Bravery is not a rush of sublime moral character at all.  Real bravery is actually not giving a shit about who you are ready to murder.  Bravery is blood for fun.  Bravery is realizing how much of a pleasurable rush it is, not to be capable of hesitating to kill the one who has pushed you to this precipice.  Bravery is laughing while you do this, and doing it harder because it feels good; in fact, it feels so good, that your opponent being armed is merely a barrier to work around.

Do you want to be brave, or do you want to be gentle?  Do you want to be brave, or compassionate?  Do you want to be brave, or kind?  Do you want to be brave, or do you want to be loving?  

Bravery is not character.  Bravery is necessity in a broken world full of sick people who will inflict their darkness on you if you don't fight back.  I don't want this necessity.  I don't want to be brave.  Not any more.  I want to be loving, kind, compassionate, and gentle now.  If the sight of a baby bird fallen out of the nest doesn't break my heart, if the tears of a child lost in a grocery store doesn't make me rush to pick them up, then I need to keep learning compassion.  

Because I have been in the head space where the helicopter raid and jungle napalm scene in Apocalypse Now would have been adequate treatment for my enemies.  I would have broken out the surfboard and shed not a tear after giving the orders.  

Anyone who cannot see the tragedy behind such necessity should not be viewed as any kind of moral authority.  This is why I read Tolkien, a master of moral allegory, a man who fought at the Somme- the epitome of unnecessary butchery- versus the wankology of most modern fantasy.  

Anyone who defines bravery as anything but the most tragic, compassion-killing, and unnecessary of necessities, does not understand bravery.  If bravery is strength, I want to be weak.  If bravery is the will to live without a heart, then let me die with one, no matter how broken it is by the end.  Because courage, not bravery, is the willingness to allow the world to break your heart, and choosing compassion to the end.

Snowed in: a great way to rotate a food hoarder's pantry

My mother hoards food. It's a child-of-the-Depression thing, except her parents were the children of the Depression. But her self esteem seems hinged on a pantry bursting with crap that it will take years to go through and eat. So when an ice storm from hell isolates us, you can bet I enjoy the hell out of the journey of jungle discovery I can make in the pantry. Looking at the ages of some of the spices about three feet back, I half expect to find generic cans of nuclear crackers and peanut butter from the Reagan era.

This early morning, the ice storm gods have demanded a sacrifice: for me to make two tofu lasagnas at 3 AM out of leftover pasta sauce, all the leftover cheese ends and crumb-carrying cheese bags populating the cheese drawer, mooshed garlic tofu instead of ricotta (which is really good), the multiple jars of lonely antipasta in the back of the fridge with half a teaspoonful of (garlic, roasted peppers, artichoke hearts) left in them, all the lonely leftover vegetables from several dinners, 2/3 huge box of year old lasagna noodles shoved in the back of the cupboard, and a lonely can of cream of mushroom soup transformed with milk, garlic, and parmesan into Bechamel Topping of the Gods. 

Because a) if you want to know what to do with fridge leftovers and pantry sentinels after being snowed in for a week, you call me; and b) all my life I have possessed the Huggins gene for being a gourmet Italian cook in the wee hours, because the world is a roomier place to think and work in when all the other minds in it are quiet and asleep, and the Bolognese tastes better for some reason. 

The last project, last night at 3 AM, was several loaves of fruit bread I made from all the leftover xmas baking fruit and crushed pecans, the never-used frozen cranberries, the unused pin oatmeal, Splenda, treacle, baking powder, allspice, 2 1/2 cups of flour, a cup of water and five smooshed manky bananas. This fruit bread was so good for breakfast it put Tesco's finest teabrack to shame. It's also vegan, which you completely don't notice. The project before that was oatmeal biscuit berry cobbler and chicken stew, and before that, traditional yeast-based stuffed pepperoni bread and baked ziti.

3 AM is the best time to cook, because nobody will question the product if they can't see and judge the process. (ie "NO, I will not eat something you baked with sour milk!" versus "Mmmm, this sweet onion cornbread is to die for!!") Being stuck with what I'm given, and making a celebration out of it, is something I can be inspired to do very very well. Also, busy-baking meatless entrees offsets the parental panic response to there being only one day's worth of meat left in the house. It'll be into Sunday before the roads are melted...maybe.

Drawing You

Slowly I brush my thumb across your face,

the lines of your aging beauty like gold in the cracks

of a broken vessel, made priceless,

the heat of naked banished ego blushing your cheeks,

after a life of vanity, of staged male pride,

that you finally set aside for a wise woman’s softness,

and ended entirely too soon.

You are the broken masterpiece, the cracking fresco, the crumbling palace,

forgotten toasts echoing through your halls of priceless proud memory.

Your old friends wandered gaily away like a fading summer day,

carrying golden masks and knighthoods,

yet you persevered for Art, ever the prince, never the peer.

In the deep symphonic darkness of your resonant vocal perfection,

in rippling elocution savoring my mind with chocolate smoothness,

the cedar wood vibration of your emotion thrumming the strings of my heart,

You whisper your suffering into me, and confess your sin.

Your face cradled in my hands, your eyes look away, glistening,

and I lean in to brush the impossibly perfect curve of your lips with mine,

and tickle the fleur-de-lys of your triumphant beak with my silly button nose.

The great glowing fires of your eyes lock and haunt mine,

grey emeralds of passion miles deep 

in arched lady's wells of demure Hollywood bone.

Cupid’s bow in pink parts to take my lips,

and my heart surges with joy.

Your eyes flutter closed, your breath catches

and cries out for anchor at my port,

the raging polar storm of your pain abates,

the dark clouds of sadness dissipate in blinding warmth,

and you become a being loved in healing and wholeness.

You cannot be captured.

You are a floating collage of Stanislavski, 

but I will draw gold between the pieces of you

until you remember that you are real,

until the tears are gone and your laughter's roaring echo

becomes the world's holy recollection.

Your smiling face possesses me

beyond law and condemnation,

beyond judgment and common sense,

beyond warning and choice,

and I must let go, and love.

Poem: For my Best Friend on her Wedding Day

A poem for a friend's wedding day long past but well remembered. Both of them are the sort who will joyfully and consciously grow old together, falling deeper in love every day.  Such a life blessing exists for those who truly value it and themselves, therefore hope springs eternal.

For My Best Friend On Her Wedding Day

There is no shame in luxury,

or laziness,

or sloth,

when time to practise them is wise,

and benefits you both.

We work and slave and struggle

so to keep our basic things,

for we deserve everything,

all riches owned by kings.

Yet we don’t deserve a scrap of bread,

nor the right for it to sing.

We will eat when others starve,

and live, while others die.

The honest are sent to the chopping block

while we escape, and lie.

There is no earning,

no reward,

no deserving what we make.

There’s no difference between what we give,

and what we really take.

Struggle has no meaning

other than that to survive.

And in the act of struggling,

I forget just how to live.

Struggle is for status,

and status is for fools.

In my life’s Swiss Army knife,

it’s the stupidest of tools.

So every action that you take

make conscious,

and with love.

Evil is not in the vice,

but intemperance thereof.

New Poem: Growing Up

Growing Up
by A.R. Carter

When my demons fall

I weep with relief,

excised of the gangrene

of youthful bad permission,

my conscience leaden with deep-six freedom

from the lonely, poisonous things

that I summoned long ago

out of curiosity, and a strong constitution,
thinking myself immortal.

Now, death has swept by too often,
I have felt her wings too close;
then she takes another,
and I count in thankfulness
my hard and merciless virtues.

The moral stanch of silence 

stops my heart’s bleeding.

Silence here is warm and full of sun-dust,

rippled only by the trains' insistent schedule.

My silence is like the smell of bread,

simple and richer than Solomon.

Incensed by peace, 

the beasts of boredom

shriek at my nothing affluence

pleading for a fresh finite vein

to bite into and suckle.

But for sanity’s sake,

my bitter cold breastplate has no time

for whines and bipolar tears.

And my own smug nothing cries, 

empty within

trading compassion for sanity,

a profit-loss deal negating all sin

which my badly glued heart 

cannot fathom.

Without compassion,

and new emptiness,

the creations of youth are gone.

The child of my music can’t return

though it must,

with my heart in hand;

ears set against the buzz

of the fens of mediocrity,

stubbornly punting

across the Styx of my tears

to shores 

of transcendent change.

Glencoe, Western Highlands

Introspection

Solitude, music, writing, art, reason, and nature are joys which are undervalued by the unwise.  These virtues and pleasures of the intellect do not inflict upon me the insufferable patriarchy of civilization, with the worthless proving ground of its roles, its idiotic superstitions, its power plays, and its inevitable soul-killing violence. 

Every time I lie alone with a heart and a body aching for the short-lived pleasures of love, I remember the price I had to pay for it as a woman, and when my reason returns, am glad for the hours upon hours of pleasure I derive from interests and hobbies that only I, exclusively, am present to judge.  When I lie upon my favorite chair in hours of contemplation, nobody judges me, and when I sing off-key, nobody judges me; when I choose to compose lines of poetry which are ridiculous, nobody is there to scoff, and when I draw silly things, only the paper knows how deliciously I have wasted my time. 

The one and only redemption of all that suffering I carry with me is a beautiful child I can raise to be her own woman, and if there is anything on this earth that can redeem the burden, judgment, and secondary motives of men, that would be a child whose presence and spirit are a joy.

As for all other suffering, I drop that burden with more willingness than the worst and most selfish woman you can imagine.  No man is worth sacrifice, and nobody will dare to require me to prove myself ever again.  It is a profound waste of time far better spent on meaningless joys and creative pleasures that madden the halls of power and their worshipful followers.  If any man steps within my boundaries to extricate a pound of flesh and to tax my happiness again for his own sake, he will find his hook slung into a pond of leeches and serpents, and his fate upon crawling out and unwisely pressing the matter will be of his own making.  Now, it is not about what I can give, but what I can be given.  Since I do not have a face that can launch the war of Troy, or a shower of gifts and infinite expressions of generosity, I am accepting of my solitude as a permanent situation.

With the perspective of age and observation, I find that solitude is a greater pleasure than any desire for inclusion, for all inclusion brings me into a game, and I have no time for games when I could be creating worlds of beauty in my joyously idle mind.  

I could be asked why I have not spent time in better service to humanity, but I ask humanity, what better way to show the world that none of us are obligated to be anything other than happy.  This example is my service to humanity, and I am satisfied with it.  

Poem: The Derry Cat Lady

Waterside cat lady don't give a shit.  She says what she wants.

Derry Cat Lady

by A. Carter

Fuck sake, piss off! yees wains and brats,
I'd ruller hauve me fickle cats.
Though furry and a mingin’ lot,
they love me, tho I'm auld and fat.

Hairy Gerry and big orange Bill
to-geller lap me kitchen swill,
and peaceful like, they're gnawin' bones,
but here's you wee shites a-throwin' stones.

And if I get my hands on you,
I'll teach a hard learned thing or two,
wi’ the Waterside witch's curse
of Ulster's Red Hand on your arse.

The boy who hurts a living thing
pays dear to wear the Devil's ring,
and does his work with idle hands
on guns and in the marching bands.

So quick! before you sell your soul,
a cretin bored and on the dole,
show kindness tae a simple cat,
and give his small wee head a pat,

lest ye be forever 

a fuckin twat.